


what my lips have kissed and where and why

by Mousetrap



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, but emotional
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-05-31 07:11:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15114371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mousetrap/pseuds/Mousetrap
Summary: Grantaire is sixteen and takes a bus into the city during nights he can’t sleep to find older men who pretend to believe him when he says he’s nineteen and fuck him. Enjolras is a lawyer masquerading as an activist, or maybe it’s the other way around. They meet at the beginning of summer.





	what my lips have kissed and where and why

**Author's Note:**

> hi, something small i wrote while working on something bigger
> 
> title from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay

_What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,_

_I have forgotten, and what arms have lain_

_Under my head till morning; but the rain_

_Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh_

_Upon the glass and listen for reply,_

_And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain_

_For unremembered lads that not again_

_Will turn to me at midnight with a cry._

_Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,_

_Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,_

_Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:_

_I cannot say what loves have come and gone,_

_I only know that summer sang in me_

_A little while, that in me sings no more._

 

Grantaire takes a bus into the city after his parents have gone to bed. It’s a Thursday night, but he figures he’s finally worked up the nerve and he can’t wait two more days to crawl out on a Saturday night and not worry about what time he slinks home. The bus driver doesn’t question him, just prints out a youth bus pass and closes the door. He makes his way to the three-seater near the back of the bus, and lets his body relax as he takes in the night view.

It’s a cold night, with wind whipping around like ghosts and stars burning in the skyline like far away gems, obscured by dark clouds. The back window is open and he wants to stick his out his hand feel a breeze or feel anything other than the nerves that are rising up to claim him, but he doesn’t and sits frozen and alone. He’d been wondering for a while. He knows what it feels like to kiss a girl and feel her chapped, sweet lips, but his hands don’t wonder her body like he thinks they should.

It’s thirty minutes to downtown, and from there his phone tells him it’s a ten minute walk to the bar—not the only bar for this sort of purpose, but the most accessible and crowded. His fake ID came in last week, two months after he and a group of friends wired money to an online company based in China. It says he’s nineteen and on good days, if he looks particularly tired or if he grows out his beard, he looks more than that. But he hates how his beard makes him look, meaner than he intends and wiser or someone posing for something he isn’t. He isn’t most things and he’s fine with it.

He’d rather be defined by what he lacks than stand for something he’s unsure about. He’s not a second glance or a double take. He wanted to be an artist but he hated how black turtleneck fits, so now he’s nothing. Drifting through lycée and joking around with gang of friends he feels quietly superior to, but Grantaire thinks they feel the same way about him. He doesn’t aspire to be anything more.

He is not unfamiliar with the act of reaching towards the sky and returning with hands full of rainwater.

The bar doesn’t care about his fake ID. He’s wearing tight jeans and mesh shirt and Éponine drew on his face for half an hour, then he washed it off and she did his eyeliner. She’d been the one to encourage this, to share with him the name of the bar and how to get there.

Music from the bar makes it almost too loud to talk, not that there is anyone but the bartender to talk to. He orders a whiskey sour because it’s familiar and quick. The bar is in transition from strictly university kids to older men who work downtown but live in the suburbs. It’s too late for the post-work crowd to be at its peak, but some older men in the corners are wearing nice suit jackets and must work in an office.

Sitting there, alone, makes Grantaire wish she’d come with him. Éponine had offered, but he knew it wasn’t sincere. They’d been neighbors for as long as he can remember, and she uses most nights to stay with her siblings and distract them from her parents scheming. She didn’t always act as a buffer. He remembers her, vicious and well-dressed in CE1, before she’d fallen in love with Marius and her life went even further to shit because she decided to believe in the right thing.

He isn’t alone at the bar for long. A man, balding a little, but slender and with green eyes approaches him to buy him another whiskey sour. They don’t talk for a second, just eye each other before Grantaire passes whatever test.

“Are you new to the city?” Grantaire takes a sip of his new drink to think over the question.

The man’s eyes aren’t kind, but they’re interesting and freckled with brown. His breathe is minty and Grantaire can hear the gum he’s chewing. “Visiting a cousin.”

The first time a man fucks him, he’s bent over a toilet, arms braced against the stall and looking at the ripples in the water from the force of the thrusts that propel him closer and threaten to knock his head in. He’s thinking of the water waves while the man is grunting above him. Rough hands smooth their way down Grantaire’s shivering, sweaty sides, not to find purchase and soothe, but rather to claim. He kisses his neck, his back, the back of his fingers before he starts to suck them.

It’s painful and there isn’t enough lube. He doesn’t come, and the guy doesn’t offer to help, just snakes a head down occasionally to tug him to half-hardness.

He cries afterwards, alone in the stall and wishing he could vomit, before taking the last bus back home. It’s a different bus driver and he takes the youth bus pass and sits, folded in on himself and feeling stupid and hurt in his tight pants.

But now he knows why his hands don’t wonder girl’s bodies and that might be the worst pain of all.  
The first time a man kisses his lips comes two weeks later. He hadn’t wanted to go again, but the urge is addicting moreso now than ever before because he knows what it could be like. What the pressure of a man above feels like, and how it feels to be a ditch, not just the boy falling into the ditch. To shock life back into something dying.

Before he had gotten to the bar, a man walked past him towards a neighboring bar, and when he’d turn his head to stare, the man had been looking back.

He smiled, and with raised eyebrows pointed towards the door of the next place. Grantaire smiled, and turned to follow.

After three gin and tonics, their mouths find each other. Grantaire’s hand rested on the man’s pants, and rubbed incessantly, feeling his hardness grow and twitch.

The man has thin, soft brown hair, and wide, clear eyes that are startling. “Bathroom?”  
Grantaire toys with a beaded bracelet on the man’s wrist, before he slips it onto himself.

“Sure.”  
In the bathroom, they kiss more. Pressed up against one another, Grantaire on his tip-toes for a moment, before bringing him down and capturing his tongue. The man’s hands are restless, moving from the small of his back to his sides to his crotch, cupping his hard dick and fumbling with the jean’s buttons before giving up.

“Will you blow me?” He asks.

Grantaire nods, thinking how everything is going out of order. To be fucked his first time, and now be nervous about a blow job.

He’s pushed down, gently, to his knees. He doesn’t stop to think about how filthy the floor must be and how filthy that makes him. The dick isn’t beautiful, pulsing red and veiny. He takes it into his mouth and savors it. The man has made things easy- musky and clean, with trimmed pubic hair. The head is an ocean spewing salty water. Grantaire laps at it, feeling overwhelmed but somehow filled with an innate knowledge of what to do.

He feels powerful on the floor, with the man staring down at him, eyes blown and hands running through Grantaire’s curls.

They find a rhythm, the bathroom silent save for their panting and the slick sound of spit that is pushed around during every in and out. Grantaire thinks of the night sky, of the bus ride back. He thinks about how he’ll remember this to jerk off to tonight while his parents sleep.

The man doesn’t finish before Grantaire’s jaw gets painfully sore, so he pulls out and two sets of hands jerk him to completion over his waiting tongue.

It’s dirty in a way he can appreciate, their mouths find each other after, and Grantaire’s finished himself in his pants already, but is twitching for a second round that won’t come.

The buzz starts to sink into a headache, and he leaves to catch the bus home. On the way back, he smiles at the secret of their love still bitter in his mouth.

That’s the story he tells Éponine, saving his real first time for himself. A memory to burn in his heart whenever romantic notions take him. He knows he’s not one for a big romance. He’s bug-eyed and has a darkness in his heart that scares him. He looks at a beautiful painting and wonders what it would look like burning. Sometimes, at night, when he can’t sleep, he snakes his hand down his pants and tugs himself to thoughts of being bruised and bloodied. This emptiness that eats up at the darkness isn’t any better. He covers everything earnest about himself with an air of good humour, but sometimes things slip when he gets too close to someone.

Éponine isn’t appropriately scandalized, just tells him to be safe. She still offers to go with him, but he’s found a confidence in his rhythm now. He visits the bar a few times a month, picking nights were the urge to crawl out of his skin is overpowering. He doesn’t always end up fucked by someone, but it’s more common than not. No one has ever approached him twice, and he isn’t hopeful enough or satisfied enough to look for repeats.

Two months before his seventeenth birthday, he meets him. School is out, and the bar is less crowded as the university students have flocked to their summer homes. The man stands out in a crowd of darkness.

He wasn’t someone who regularly comes to the bar, and had walked in with a small group of friends. By now, Grantaire can recognize two of the friends, and smiles at them as they passed to find a table.

The new man was blond, with curling hair and pale eyelashes that could’ve given him an angelic glow if it wasn’t for the harshness of his jaw line and the sharp curve of his long nose.

They made eye contact, and the man glared at him harshly before turning away flushed, and speaking to a friend at the table across from Grantaire’s.

Two men throughout the night come over to the lonely table. But Grantaire stares at the oak, and is unable to get the blond out of his mind. The men don’t stay for long.  
The blond, despite his glare, keeps glancing at Grantaire’s table for one. He’s eyeing the drink in his hand as if keeping track of how many he’s been consuming. Before Grantaire finishes his third drink of the hour, the man makes his way over.

His hair whips with the force of his walk, and he doesn’t sit opposite Grantaire but instead leans over the table and demands: “Tell me you’re at least twenty?” Grantaire nods a hasty yes and then feels two impossibly warm hands cupping the side of his face. He’s pulled in for a kiss than becomes something more than a kiss. The hands still lay on his face, angling him perfectly, and the lips that claim his are possessive. He’s never felt more wanted, no longer a faceless body to expel desire, but a person to have passions within in them ignited.

They barely talk before Grantaire has to risk kissing him again, tipsy enough to be bold and the temptation of being claimed by this godlike stranger is too strong to resist. Their lips, his hand on his wrist, everywhere they touch burns.

“Bathroom?” Grantaire asks, after waiting ages for the blond to say it, to say something in the pauses for breathe between their lips.

“I’m not going to fuck you in the bathroom like a degenerate.” He sounds angry at the suggestion. Grantaire wishes he was strong enough to pull himself away, but he’s caught in blue eyes and stays.

“You can come home with me,” he finally says, lips still close by, the breath is one they share.

For a moment, Grantaire is struck. This offer is a legato when it should be staccato. The music swells towards something romantic in the dim lights of the bar. He’s never been taken home before.

Grantaire brings their lips together again, reminding himself what it feels like to burn. “Ok,” he goes in for another kiss, “take me home.”

It turns out, Enjolras lives too far to walk from the bar, but still in downtown. He orders an uber, upset they’ve missed the last metro because, as he explains slowly, he doesn’t agree with the policies of uber, but it’s better than drunk driving and the taxis roll by too unreliably at this hour.

He lives in a tiny apartment with a great view. The kitchen is clean in an unused way, and there are stacks of books on every table.

“Are you a teacher?” Grantaire asks, fiddling with the man’s hands that are wrapped around his waist and curled protectively on his hipbone.

They move into the kitchen, silently staring each other down, breathing heavy.

“No.” In the uber back, they’d been making out ferociously, pushed towards each other. Grantaire’s hands had wondered unabashedly through the man’s hair, waves crashing below his ears and a lustrous blond. Now, talking feels like pushing on a pull door.

Grantaire thinks there is nothing for his nerves but alcohol. “Pour me a drink.”

“I’ll pour you some water,” the man is already up from the table and filling a glass cup with tap water. In Grantaire’s part of the city, the tap water isn’t drinkable.

He sips at the water, and tries to give seductive eyes above the glass to the man, but they both end up laughing.

The laughter cuts through the thickness of the moment, and clears the way for something sweet. After sitting his water cup on the table, Grantaire makes his way into the man’s lap. Up close, his pale eyelashes are beautiful, and his eyebrows are traced over by Grantaire's reverent fingertips. The places they are touching burn again, and he begins to sweat. From the position, he’s taller than the man, and he distributes his weight evenly across his lap.

"Will you kiss me," the man breathes.

Grantaire answers with his mouth closed.

It starts slow, and Grantaire has every intention to keep it that way and perhaps hid his youthful inexperience. But the passion builds a fire in the pit of his stomach, and his mouth roams widely. The kiss grows to cheeks, to fingers, to grinding his hardness into the man. And finally, finally, being led slowly to the bedroom.

In bed, the man is something entirely different. If he had perhaps seemed fierce before, Grantaire hadn’t known to what extent his severity was manifested. He pins Grantaire’s wrists down once they're stripped, and bites at his collar bone sharply.

“Look at you," He says, “Almost begging for it but not quite there.”

He takes him there, removing Grantaire’s thin white shirt and black skinny jeans with a singular focus. Grantaire risks a look into the man’s blue eyes once they’re equally naked and pressed up against each other. The reflection of himself he sees within them sets his insides on fire, and he ignites the flame by pressing their lips together and trailing his hand down to rub against the hard lines of the stranger’s body.

Grantaire feels like what they're doing is beyond kissing. If kissing is what he's down in the bar’s bathroom with the dozen of faceless men, this is something else. This is his tongue behind held prisoner in a hot mouth, this is being desired with eyes wide open, this is looking down a barrel of a gun and having your heart leap from your chest but your body remains still.

The man moves Grantaire’s hands away from his body and pins his wrists down above his head.

Grantaire’s cock is weeping, and he disengages their mouths to whine.

“Please, please, fuck me.”

He lets go of Grantaire's wrists and moves his body down.

His tongue feels hot against Grantaire's cock, and then it sinking lower and sending wetness down to the sheets.

“Fuck,” he moans, shocked at the feeling and surprised to be a recipient of so much attention.

He licks at the cleft between Grantaire’s ass, before finally going there. To grope with his fingers while his tongue presses in causes spills to tear from Grantaire’s eyes.

The vulnerability he feels is exposed in the open air, but so is the devotion of the love-making, different from the quick fucks he’s experienced before. The teas aren’t sad, but it does expel some of the sadness within him, unable to be contained at the same time the man hovers over him and thrusts inside of him.

He pulls out and ties the condom, a reluctant expert. Grantaire tries to control his shaking body, but the heat he had building all evening hadn’t been extinguished yet.

They exchange names after they both come, waiting to go again. Their bodies are finished but their minds are racing with a level of desperation that clings to them, and throws them towards each other with lips, soft cocks rubbing.

“Enjolras.” Grantaire tests out the name like a prayer.  
“I’ll make you scream it, I swear.”

Enjolras pushes Grantaire onto his stomach, and angles his hips closer. Neither of them are hard just yet, but he rubs his dick against Grantaire’s wet hole, seemingly mesmerized.

He speaks softly, words Grantaire isn’t sure he is supposed to hear, but it comforts his heart, which is feeling overwhelmed since the moment they kissed.

Finally, hard again, Enjolras ventures to start again. Sliding in slowly, the frenzy gone, but the pace still betraying a tender emotion. Their hands tangle together as Enjolras fucks him to completion. Grantaire, with not a hand on his cock, manages to come first. He’d be embarrassed but his head is stretched back and they are making out slowly, tongues licking carelessly into each others mouth. They are attached everywhere and he feels on fire.

Afterwards, Enjolras lays in the bed, wrapped up and turned away from Grantaire.

He slips out of bed and makes his way to the door where his clothes lay in a careless pile. In the darkness, they look like someone else’s clothes, a stranger who had entered the apartment who hadn’t known what it felt like to experience God inside him.

He's thinking of how he’ll get home, and if Éponine would answer her phone this late at night. The happiness hasn’t burst from him yet, but it’s close as the somber mood of putting on clothes in the dark nips at his excitement.

Enjolras had been the first person to touch him in many ways, his body is still tingling. He thinks part of him will always belong to that man.

“Come back to bed, I’ll make you coffee in the morning.” Enjolras says, head still buried under the covers.

The room is unnaturally warm, and smells heady like hours of sex and sweat. He takes stock of the design of the room, too drunk and horny to really notice before. The walls are bare were there aren’t bookshelves, filled too thickly and nearing collapse.

Grantaire can think of a million reasons to duck out now. His heart, beating erratically, like it acquired something stupid like hope, is a warning sign. He thinks of earlier that night, how he had cried in the sheets and felt completely undone. He’d never wanted to be known more than he had when Enjolras had held his hand, fingers tracing his own, as he’d pushed inside of him the first time, the second time.

In the morning, the reality of this moments strangeness will hit him. To have his flesh be so completely known while his mind is a stranger is bizarre. Enjolras, without the haze of darkness and inebriation will see Grantaire’s age and devotion plainly.

He can think of a million reasons not to stay. But he’s always loved a bad idea, and the tendrils of blond hair are calling to him like a siren.

So he crawls back into bed, feeling his heart sink into his chest in a pain he’ll always covet, and stays.

**Author's Note:**

> please comment, i love reading them, they keep me so motivated! thank you for reading .xo


End file.
